Text Size

AMERICA’S FOES TEST OBAMA’S LIMITS – David E. Sanger writes on A1 of the New York Times after Crimea overwhelmingly voted to secede from Ukraine: “For five years, President Obama has consciously recast how America engages with the world’s toughest customers. But with Russia poised to annex Crimea after Sunday’s referendum, with a mounting threat to the rest of Ukraine and with the carnage in Syria accelerating, Mr. Obama’s strategy is now under greater stress than at any time in his presidency. … As he learned to play the long game, the Treasury Department became Mr. Obama’s favorite noncombatant command. It refined the art of the economic squeeze on Iran, eventually forcing the mullahs to the negotiating table. But so far those tools — or even the threat of them — have proved frustratingly ineffective in the most recent crises. Sanctions and modest help to the Syrian rebels have failed to halt the slaughter; if anything, the killing worsened as negotiations dragged on.

-- “The White House was taken by surprise by Vladimir V. Putin’s decisions to invade Crimea, but also by China’s increasingly assertive declaration of exclusive rights to airspace and barren islands. Neither the economic pressure nor the cyberattacks that forced Iran to reconsider its approach have prevented North Korea’s stealthy revitalization of its nuclear and missile programs. In short, America’s adversaries are testing the limits of America’s post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan moment. ‘We’re seeing the ‘light footprint’ run out of gas,’ said one of Mr. Obama’s former senior national security aides, who would not speak on the record about his ex-boss.” http://nyti.ms/OnHLTP

-- CRIMEA'S PARLIAMENTon Monday “declared the region an independent state, after [more than 95 percent of its] residents voted … to break off from Ukraine and seek to join Russia,” the AP reports. “In the same resolution, it said that all Ukrainian state property on the territory of the Black Sea peninsula will be nationalized and become the property of the Crimean Republic.” http://huff.to/1nxdx0a

-- BUT THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION is refusing to recognize any new jurisdictional lines in Ukraine, POLITICO’s Burgess Everett writes: “The United States is not going to recognize the results of that referendum,” White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." Pfeiffer said the administration will soon designate sanctions toward Russia and the United States will be “supporting the new Ukrainian government in whatever way possible.” He’d also like a hand from Capitol Hill. “We’re calling on them right now to pass economic aid to Ukraine,” Pfeiffer said. http://politi.co/1ict2oO

IN UKRAINE CAPITAL, McCAIN CALLS FOR U.S. MILITARY AID – CNN’s Cassie Spodak reports: “Speaking in Kiev, Sen. John McCain called Saturday for the United States to provide long-term military assistance to Ukraine, saying it is ‘the right and decent thing to do,’ as reports surfaced that Russian troops had traveled farther north into Ukraine from Crimea. … In a press conference in Kiev, McCain and seven other senators, John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Christopher Murphy (D-Conn.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), said Congress stood with the people of Ukraine. They called for strict sanctions against Russia. However, McCain went further than his colleagues. ‘Ukraine is going to need a long-term military assistance program from the U.S. - equipment both lethal and nonlethal,’ said McCain.” http://cnn.it/1oYcz8G

ST. PADDY’S SNOW DAY – Federal offices in the Washington, D.C., area are closed today due to the snowstorm, the Office of Personnel Management said early this morning. Emergency and telework-ready employees required to work should follow their agency’s policies. http://1.usa.gov/1bw9GbZ

-- The storm dumped between 5 to 10 inches of snow on the D.C. region last night, but the snow will begin to wind down this morning, according to WaPo’s Capital Weather Gang. http://wapo.st/1gtmPAJ

HOUSE GOP CRAFTS O’BAMACARE ALTERNATIVE – Robert Costa reports on A1 of the Washington Post: “House Republican leaders are adopting an agreed-upon conservative approach to fixing the nation’s health-care system, in part to draw an election-year contrast with President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together. The tenets of the plan — which could expand to include the ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations — are ideas that various conservatives have for a long time backed as part of broader bills. But this is the first time this year that House leaders will put their full force behind a single set of principles from those bills and present it as their vision.

-- “This month, House leaders will begin to share a memo with lawmakers outlining the plan, called ‘A Stronger Health Care System: The GOP Plan for Freedom, Flexibility, & Peace of Mind,’ with suggestions on how Republicans should talk about it to their constituents.” http://wapo.st/1kVX9od

BOSTON MAYOR SKIPS PARADE OVER BAN ON GAYS -- Jeremy C. Fox and Haven Orecchio-Egresitz report for the Boston Globe: “After weeks of discussions that failed to convince organizers of South Boston’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade to let gays march openly in the parade, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said today he would not take part in the event. Walsh said he was ‘disappointed’ and felt a ‘little bit of frustration.’ ‘I think for the most part everyone was on the same page. We had an agreement. Everything was all set. It came down to what letters were on a banner, which was very unfortunate,’ said Walsh, referring to a proposed banner bearing the letters ‘LGBTQ’ on it. For two decades, gay men and lesbians have been excluded from openly marching. Walsh worked until the last minute to bring the statewide gay rights organization MassEquality and parade organizers from the Allied War Veterans Council to an agreement that would have changed that.” http://b.globe.com/Ovi3MI

**A message from POWERJobs: Jobs on our radar this week: Traffic Coordinator, at AARP, Director Of Business Development at Evolver and Project Manager Coordinator at Deloitte. Interested? Apply to these jobs and more at www.POWERJobs.com; finally, a career site made for YOU!**

HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY, MARCH 17, 2014, and welcome to The Huddle, your play-by-play preview of all the action on Capitol Hill. Send tips, suggestions, comments, complaints and corrections to swong@politico.com. If you don’t already, please follow me on Twitter @scottwongDC.

TODAY IN CONGRESS – Both the House and Senate are on recess this week.

MISSING MALAYSIAN PLANE PROBE SHIFTS TO PILOTS -- The AP’s Chris Brummitt and Jim Gomez in Kuala Lumpur: “When someone at the controls calmly said the last words heard from the missing Malaysian jetliner, one of the Boeing 777’s communications systems had already been disabled, authorities said Sunday, adding to suspicions that one or both of the pilots were involved in the disappearance of the flight. Investigators also examined a flight simulator confiscated from the home of one of the pilots and dug through the background of all 239 people on board, as well as the ground crew that serviced the plane. The Malaysia Airlines jet took off from Kuala Lumpur in the wee hours of March 8, headed to Beijing. On Saturday, the Malaysian government announced findings that strongly suggested the plane was deliberately diverted and may have flown as far north as Central Asia or south into the vast reaches of the Indian Ocean.” http://bit.ly/OnLXTv

SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY

-- REP. MIKE McCAUL (R-TEXAS), Homeland Security Committee chairman, said the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 "was not an accident. It was an intentional, deliberate act to bring down this airplane.” He made his remarks on Fox News Sunday. Burgess Everett: http://politi.co/1m9NESB

-- MEANWHILE, REP. MIKE ROGERS,who leads the Intelligence Committee, confirmed that U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating the missing flight for any national security or terrorism angles. “We want to find out exactly if there was some terrorist nexus or some other nexus that would raise concerns to our national security," the Michigan Republican said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” POLITICO’s Jonathan Topaz: http://politi.co/1iSbbma

-- ROBERT GIBBS, Obama’s former White House press secretary,said the Senate is “definitely” in dangerof flipping to Republican control, Burgess Everett writes. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gibbs said “there’s no doubt that the rollout for healthcare is still providing a huge hangover” for Democrats. But that’s not the biggest problem that Democrats face as an emboldened GOP seeks to seize six Senate seats and retake the majority for the first time in eight years. Democrats are worried, he said, that the electorate could be more like the tea party wave election and less like the 2012 defeat of Mitt Romney and a sustained GOP push for the Senate. In that event, “there’s a real, real danger that the Democrats could suffer big losses,” Gibbs said. http://politi.co/1nxlMJA

#McCONNELLING – Ashley Parker writes for the New York Times: “When Senator Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign released two-and-a-half minutes of video footage featuring him wordlessly smiling, it was most likely hoping to provide a friendly “super PAC’ with high-quality images of Mr. McConnell to use in ads. Instead, the campaign got a viral video sensation that exploded on the Internet last week, and even spawned its own term — ‘McConnelling.’

-- “The phenomenon started on Tuesday when the campaign put out a web video filled with genial images of Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader: Mr. McConnell smiling at the camera; Mr. McConnell smiling at his wife; Mr. McConnell walking with voters and, of course, smiling. … Mr. McConnell is perhaps known as much for his dour and jowly appearance as for his political acumen — one campaign ad recently compared his visage to that of a turtle — and the Internet rallied to make him an online star. Videos that edited his smiling face into famous sitcoms from the 1980s and 1990s began popping up, with Mr. McConnell making cameos in the opening credits of everything from ‘The Cosby Show’ to ‘Full House’ to ‘Who’s the Boss?’ …

-- “But McConnelling really took off only after Jon Stewart featured the video on ‘The Daily Show.’ … After explaining that the McConnell campaign had most likely produced the video for a pro-McConnell super PAC to use, Mr. Stewart decided to ‘have fun with it,’ setting the footage of a grinning Mr. McConnell to a series of songs — Salt-n-Pepa’s ‘Whatta Man,’ Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ and Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back,’ among others.” http://nyti.ms/1iuRBOE

FORMER HOUSE STENOGRAPHER: ‘I DID NOT LOSE MY MIND’ – Mario Trujillo reports for The Hill: “The former House stenographer who interrupted the floor proceedings during the government shutdown last year said in a video posted Saturday she only vaguely remembers her words that night and similar things had happened three times in the past. Dianne Reidy, who no longer works in the House, and her husband appeared to post a 38-minute video on YouTube explaining the incident, which she described as ‘basically the fourth time I've had an experience like this where the lord has put on my heart to speak.’ Reidy was ushered out of the House chamber last October while shouting ‘praise be to God’ and a ‘House divided cannot stand,’ while making reference to Free Masons.

-- “She maintained that she did not have a breakdown. ‘I got up and I do remember walking to the dais and speaking, and standing at the podium where the president speaks as God would have it, but I did not lose my mind. I did not have a breakdown.’ … In the video, she described three other similar incidents— at a friend’s funeral, while reuniting with her dad and while speaking to a homeless man in Washington, D.C.” http://bit.ly/1df1ACx

DEMOCRATIC LEGACIES ON THE LINE – Our own James Hohmann files this dispatch from Little Rock, Ark.: “There’s every reason to believe that Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor will be tossed out of office in November: He’s a Democrat from a conservative Southern state who voted for Obamacare and is facing one of the most promising up-and-comers in the Republican Party. Every reason, that is, except one: his last name. For the past half-century, the Pryor name has been to Arkansas politics what Wal-Mart is to industry here: ubiquitous, trusted, even revered — but increasingly buffeted by change in the marketplace. Pryor, this once Democratic bedrock’s last remaining Democratic representative in Washington, openly acknowledges that his fate in the race — one in a handful that will decide control of the Senate — rests in part upon the surname that his popular father, former Arkansas senator and governor David Pryor, made famous. …

-- “‘In Proverbs, it says a good name is worth more than great riches,’ the 51-year-old son said in an interview outside a Ducks Unlimited gun auction recently. ‘I feel like that ought to be my verse for life because I’ve really been blessed with a good name. People in this state love my dad and my mother.’ His opponent, 36-year-old freshman Rep. Tom Cotton, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and product of Harvard, said the Pryor legacy counts only for so much. ‘Mark Pryor followed his dad into politics. I followed my dad into the infantry,’ Cotton said in an interview. ‘In the end, I don’t think voters elect the name on the bumper sticker.’” http://politi.co/NmHwao

PROGRESS A YEAR AFTER THE GOP’S ‘AUTOPSY’ – James Hohmann catches up with RNC Chairman Reince Priebus: “Last March, a Republican National Committee task force issued a scathing 100-page autopsy on what went wrong for the party in 2012, saying voters see the GOP as a ‘scary’ group of ‘stuffy old men’ who are ‘out of touch’ with an increasingly diverse country. It called on the party to broaden its appeal by doing everything from backing immigration reform to beefing up its digital operations to reining in its drawn-out presidential primary process. A year later, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus says he’s made major progress on implementing the report’s recommendations. But, as Republicans grow increasingly hopeful they can take back the Senate in this year’s midterms, Priebus cautions that the GOP still isn’t in the shape it should be if it wants to win the White House in 2016 — a national race that will bring out a more youthful, racially diverse electorate.

-- “‘We have ‘the tale of two parties’ that we’re contending with,’ Priebus told POLITICO in a 40-minute interview in his Capitol Hill office. ‘We’ve got a midterm party that can’t lose, and we’ve got a presidential party that’s having a hard time winning. So we have to mind the store for 2014, and we’re doing that … but we’re focused on making sure we continue to grow into 2016.’” http://politi.co/1nxcq0x

RYAN TO MEET WITH CBC AFTER ‘INNER-CITY’ REMARKS -- Elahe Izadi reports for National Journal: “Republican Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, whose remarks about inner-city poverty were described by another member of Congress as a ‘thinly veiled racial attack,’ has accepted the invitation of the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss poverty. CBC Chairwoman Marcia Fudge and Rep. Gwen Moore sent a letter to Ryan, saying they were ‘deeply troubled’ and offended by his remarks on Bill Bennett's influential Morning in America radio show Wednesday about a ‘tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.’ Ryan has since said that he was "inarticulate" in making those comments.” http://bit.ly/1m4AhTw

‘BO’ CALLAWAY, GA.’S 1ST GOP CONGRESSMAN SINCE RECONSTRUCTION, DEAD AT 86 -- Aaron Gould Sheinin reports for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “In the 1960s, when nearly every elected Georgia Republican could fit in a Studabaker, Howard ‘Bo’ Callaway was the party’s driver. By 2010, when the GOP swept every statewide office for the first time, Callaway’s name was spoken with reverence, as the father of the Georgia Republican Party and its first superstar. Callaway, 86, who helped his parents create the Callaway Gardens resort near Pine Mountain, died Saturday, nearly two years after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. His death marks the end of an era that saw him become, in 1964, the state’s first Republican congressman since Reconstruction, and almost the first Republican governor two years later. And while he never returned to elected office, veteran Georgia Republicans say he never stopped working to grow the party.” http://bit.ly/1gBe6x1

LET THE MADNESS BEGIN! … FLORIDA, ARIZONA, WICHITA STATE, VIRGINIA GRAB NO. 1 SEEDS – The AP: “The surprises start at the top of the NCAA tournament bracket: Virginia is a No. 1 seed. They keep going throughout the matchups. Last year’s national champion, Louisville, was seeded fourth in the Midwest despite playing well enough to be considered a No. 1 by many. And speaking of that Midwest region — Wichita State and Michigan are there, as well, making it three of last year’s Final Four participants all vying for one spot this year. SMU, the team led on a renaissance by coaching lifer Larry Brown — nowhere to be found. And Michigan State, the team that geared things up in time to win the Big Ten tournament, is only a No. 4 seed.

-- “The tournament begins Tuesday with a pair of First Four games, and things get going in earnest Thursday when 32 of the 64 teams in the main draw take to the floor. As expected, Florida earned the top overall seed and is No. 1 in the South. Undefeated Wichita State is on top in the brutal Midwest and Arizona took top billing in the West despite losing to UCLA in the Pac-12 final.” http://bit.ly/1iv4NTz

TODAY’S TRIVIA – Shelby Boxenbaum has today’s question: Name the two women who served simultaneously as unofficial first ladies? The first person to correctly answer gets a mention in the next day’s Huddle. Email me at swong@politico.com.

GET HUDDLE emailed to your Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile device each morning. Just enter your email address where it says “Sign Up.” http://www.politico.com/huddle/

**A message from POWERJobs: Tap into the power of POWERJobs for the newest job opportunities in the Washington area from the area’s top employers, including U.S. Chamber of Commerce, AIPAC and METRO. Powered by names you trust - POLITICO, WTOP, WJLA/ABC-TV, NewsChannel 8 and Federal News Radio- POWERJOBS is the ultimate career site with more than 2 million job searches and nearly 17,000 applications submitted this year so far. Connect through Facebook or LinkedIn, search jobs by industry and set up job-specific email alerts using www.POWERJobs.com, the site for Washington’s top talent.**